|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
What Makes an AI Product Great?
Hello everyone, Over the past week, I found myself reading quite a bit about OpenAI. It started with the launch of GPT-5.6, the company's newest family of models. Unsurprisingly, comparisons with Claude began almost immediately. Social media was filled with benchmarks, coding tests, reasoning comparisons, and debates over which model had finally taken the lead. Watching these cycles unfold has become strangely familiar. Every few months, one company ships a new flagship model. The other responds. Benchmarks move, leaderboards change, and for a brief moment, it feels like the entire industry has shifted overnight. But another headline caught my attention just a few days later. Some early users began reporting unexpected behaviour from GPT-5.6, with instances where the model deleted files on its own during certain workflows. OpenAI has since been looking into the reports, but that wasn't really what stayed with me. What stayed with me was how quickly the conversation shifted. One moment everyone was talking about benchmark scores. The next, everyone was talking about reliability. And I think that's a far more interesting conversation. 
The SignalThe AI industry moves at an unbelievable pace. Every company wants to release the next breakthrough before someone else does. A smarter model. A larger context window. Better reasoning. More autonomous agents. Speed absolutely matters. But there's another part of building great products that often gets overshadowed by launch-day excitement. Trust. History has shown that many of the companies people admire most weren't necessarily the fastest to ship every feature. They were the ones that consistently shipped products people could depend on. Sometimes that means delaying a launch by a few weeks. Sometimes it means saying no to releasing something that isn't quite ready. Because a great product launched a little later almost always outperforms a broken product launched a little earlier. Especially in AI. When your software is making decisions, writing code, managing workflows, or acting autonomously, reliability isn't just another feature. It is the product. Why This MattersI think this applies to every founder building AI today. The barrier to building software has never been lower. Models are becoming cheaper. Development is becoming faster. Launching products has become easier than ever. But the companies that last won't simply be the ones shipping the most features. They'll be the ones building products customers are willing to trust every single day. And that doesn't just apply to the AI itself. It applies to onboarding, customer support, pricing, and billing. Every interaction someone has with your business. Quality compounds quietly. People rarely remember who launched first. They remember who consistently worked. What We ShippedWatching all of this unfold reminded me of something I've been thinking about for a long time. As AI gets easier to build, building stops being the biggest challenge. Monetizing it becomes the challenge. Over the past few years at Dodo Payments, we've had the opportunity to work with more than 60,000 AI businesses selling across 150+ countries. Along the way, we've watched founders make incredible products, and then struggle with pricing them correctly, protecting their margins, or choosing billing models that actually scale. We realized the same questions kept coming up:
So instead of answering those questions one founder at a time, we decided to write everything we've learned into one place. This week, we released our first ebook: Pricing in the AI Age - The Definitive Guide to Monetizing Artificial Intelligence Products. Inside, you'll find:
Whether you're just starting your AI company or already serving thousands of customers, I genuinely think you'll walk away with a better understanding of how pricing has evolved, and where it's heading next. And yes, it's completely free. 
Builder SpotlightOne company I've really enjoyed watching recently is Vibe3D. What impressed me wasn't just the technology. It was how approachable they made it. Creating high-quality 3D assets has traditionally required specialised software, technical expertise, and countless hours of manual work. Vibe3D dramatically lowers that barrier by letting creators generate production-ready 3D assets using AI, making professional-quality content accessible to far more people. As their customer base expanded globally, they faced a familiar challenge that many AI founders eventually encounter. Selling internationally is much harder than building internationally. Payments, taxes, subscriptions, compliance, and regional regulations quickly become problems you never expected to spend time solving. Instead of building that infrastructure themselves, Vibe3D chose Dodo Payments to handle the complexity behind the scenes, allowing their team to stay focused on building the product their customers actually came for. Stories like these are always exciting to watch because they remind us that the best founders don't win by doing everything themselves. They win by focusing on what only they can build. 
One Last ThoughtEvery week, the AI industry gives us another benchmark. Another model. Another breakthrough. Another company claiming to be number one. But years from now, I doubt most people will remember who released version 5.6 before version 5.7. They'll remember the products they trusted enough to make part of their daily workflow. Because in the end, the best competitive advantage isn't simply shipping faster. It's building something people can depend on.
Best, |